In the past two election cycles, an explosion of attention has been given to communities where people are less likely to challenge their own opinions. The rise of social media has changed the way information is provided.
Surprisingly little evidence of social media echo chambers was found when scientists investigated them. Exposure to news increases polarization. The studies missed part of the picture. They did not include television in their analysis of the average American's experience of news.
We tracked the TV news consumption habits of tens of thousands of American adults over the course of a year. Four aspects of news consumption that we discovered paint an unnerving picture of the TV news industry.
The first thing we did was measure how political news consumers are on TV and the internet. Based on their TV news consumption, we found that 17 percent of Americans are politically divided between the left and right. That is three to four times higher than the average American.
AdvertisementIn the month of November 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president, the percentage of Americans who liked to watch TV went up to as high as 22%. There was a second spike in the months leading into December of last year, after a record number of Democratic campaign ads were aired on television. There is a correlation between content choices and political events.
After six months, left-leaning TV audiences are 10 times more likely to remain segregation than left-leaning online audiences, and right-leaning TV audiences are the same.
It is important to keep in mind that 70 percent of right-leaning viewers and 80 percent of left-leaning viewers change their news diet within six months. Only about 4% of the population are included in long- lasting echo chambers.
Left- and right-leaning sources are more likely to be segregating than TV audiences. A typical unvaried TV news diet consists of seven broad buckets of TV news sources.
Compared to online audiences, partisan TV news consumers tend to stick to their preferred news sources. Most Americans who consume MSNBC don't consume news from other sources. Most Americans who consume mostly Fox News do not go beyond that network. Online news consumers still receive a lot of news from outside their main area of focus.
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The TV news environment and TV news channels had an unbalanced balance. According to our observations, Americans are turning away from national TV news in large numbers, and this is more from centrist news sources than from left- or right- leaning ones. The remaining TV news audience moved from broadcast news to cable news.
The partisan TV news audience is growing even though the overall TV news audience is decreasing. The audience as a whole is in the process of being divided, as partisan TV viewers and TV news consumers continue to grow.
It's important for democratic processes to have exposure to opposing views. People are more entrenched in their own opinions if they only interact with similar views in political echo chambers. It can have major consequences for the health of democracy if echo chambers are as widespread as has been made out to be.
According to our findings, television is the top cause of partisan audience segregation. Most Americans still consume a balanced news diet.
Given that the partisan TV news audience alone consumes more minutes of news than the entire online news audience, it may be worthwhile to pay more attention to this part of the information ecosystems.
Homa is an associate research scientist at the university.
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